Matt Bell

Bryan Furuness (of "Ballgrabber" fame, one of my favorite Hobart stories of all time) recently asked me to send out a call for submissions for Booth, the literary journal he edits for the MFA program at Butler University. Bryan wrote that they're "looking for fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and quirky lists . . . basically everything. Apparently, we're the only lit mag in America not drowning in submissions." Do what you can to make Bryan regret his words by sending them a submission today. Booth is a nice-looking journal to read, and Bryan's a great guy who will definitely treat your submissions well. Go submit!

Kim Parko's Cure All is the newest release from Caketrain Press (my publisher for my novella The Collectors). I've really enjoyed read Parko's work, and I'm looking forward to seeing this book both for the text, which I'm sure will be great, and also the design, which--judging from the cover--once again raises the bar what a small press book might look like. Joseph Reed is one of my favorite cover artists and book designers, and once again he's outdone himself with Parko's book.

In hopes that it'll entice you as much as it enticed me, here is an except taken from Parko's "Learn," available in the PDF sampler for the book:

I was diagnosed with failure to thrive so my mother took me home and put me under the grow lights. I spent my younger years among the chlorophyll-skinned. When I finally grew a sprout from the top of my head, it was time for kindergarten, but I only knew how to communicate through photosynthesis and was mocked or ignored by the other children. Daily I waited to get home and sit under my lamp and idly grow toward the false sun with my seedlings.

I was diagnosed with fire blight. They put me in a basement room all day and I came home cracked and wilted. Mother worried about my health and upped the dosage of fertilizer. When I entered grade school the principal was made weary by my size relative to my intelligence. “These are dangerous times,” he said.

You can order Cure All here, for just eight dollars including shipping. If you're on the fence, remember that last year, both my novella and Tina May Hall's sold out very quickly. So don't delay! I've yet to be disappointed by any Caketrain publication, and I'm confident that streak is going to continue here.

My story "The Receiving Tower" is out now in the just-released Willow Springs 65, alongside new fiction by Thomas Cooper (one of my favorite flash writers--his chapbook Phantasmagoria is fantastic), and poetry by Laura Kasischke, David Wojahn, Gary Copeland Lilley, and Robert Wrigley, among others. There are also interviews with Charles Baxter and Fady Joudah, as well as non-fiction by Diana Joseph. You can read my story in the print issue, and also on the website, where it's accompanied by an Author Profile, in which assistant web editor Greg Leunig kindly let me go on about both my story and what I've been reading.

Here's the beginning of "The Receiving Tower":

Most nights, we climb to the tower's roof to stand together beneath the satellite dishes, where we watch the hundreds of meteorites fall through the aurora and across the arctic sky. Trapped high in the atmosphere, they streak the horizon then flare out, with only the rarest among them surviving long enough to burst into either mountains or tundra, that madness of snow and ice beneath us.

Once, Cormack stood beside me and prayed aloud that one might crash into the receiving tower instead and free us all.

Once, I knew which one of us Cormack actually was.

Again, you can read "The Receiving Tower" online for free, but afterward I hope you'll strongly consider subscribing to Willow Springs, which is one of my own favorite magazines (recently publishing Blake Butler, Kim Chinquee, the first excerpt I saw of Robert Lopez's Kamby Balongo Mean River, and so on). Editor Samuel Ligon is also one of the very best editors I've ever worked with, a statement I've tried to back up with a just-posted guest entry in the Emerging Writers Network's "Experiences with Editors" series, in which I said (among other things):

I can see now that Sam was the ideal reader and editor for this story: He understood my goals for it completely, and was able to articulate those goals back to me better than anyone else who had read it so far or has since. I truly believe that it would be a lesser story if it had been published by anyone else... I can’t thank Sam for taking the time to read my work so carefully, and to encourage and develop it throughout our interactions this last year. I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of great editors over the past few years, but there’s no doubt he’s one of the very best.

Thanks again, to Sam and everyone else at Willow Springs! Everyone else, I hope you enjoy the story. Thanks as always for taking the time to read my work.

 Scott Garson's American Gymnopédies is now available for pre-order from Willows Wept Press, the chapbook series edited by Molly Gaudry (and the publisher of my first chapbook, How the Broken Lead the Blind.) I've long been a fan of Garson's fascinating and innovative series of shorts, watching them appear in magazine after magazine over the past year or two. I was lucky enough to get a chance to publish three of them in the December issue of The Collagist, one of which I'd like to reprint here as a teaser for Scott's book. This is "Atlanta Gymnopédie": 

For those whose concerns are too ungainly to speak I light this candle. For my sister and her child at the Carlyle Motel—even though my house is open. For my Daddy, who'd scorn this mention of him, who'd crush the little worm of shame before it got to his head. He's old, he's old. Yes, brother, but he is alive. He stands on the boards of his porch before dawn in shirts that smell like cumin. For him, and for all of you listening, I position the flame like so.

David McLendon, editor of Unsaid, which also published some of these shorts, blurbed the book, saying that “Garson's collection reads like a travelogue of the periphery. These are plainspoken reports from a different way of seeing. Not only do these brief assertions of poetic language appear to have been composed while the author was in transit—they seem each to be a form of motion itself. Garson has done us all a great service by containing the motion of his America in the book you now hold."

Convinced yet? You can buy a copy of Scott Garson's  American Gymnopédies for just ten dollars by clicking here. Don't wait too long-- My Willows Wept Press chapbook sold out in pre-orders, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Scott's book do the same. I'd order yours today.

The first print issue of Wrong Tree Review is now available, featuring an interview with Joey Goebel, author of Commonwealth and Torture the Artist, plus fiction by Rusty Barnes, Mel Bosworth, K.L. Cook, David Erlewine, Foust, Roxane Gay, John Oliver Hodges, Stephen Graham Jones, Kilean Kennedy, Sean Lovelace, Cami Park, Ethel Rohan, J.A. Tyler, Charles Dodd White and xTx, plus my own story "Justina, Justine, Justise."

Here's the beginning of my story, as a teaser:

For the first crime they took only my thumb. Afterward they refused to talk about it, even after I confronted them, after I tossed their bedroom and confiscated the hatchet hidden in their toy box, beside their miniature gavel. When lined up and accused beside her sisters, all the oldest would say was that my trial had been fair, even without my presence: One daughter for a judge, one for the prosecution, one for the defense.

My middle daughter, she spit onto what was left of our thread-worn carpet, said my defense had been particularly difficult, considering my obvious guilt.

She said, Perhaps you should tell our mother you cut your thumb at work, so that she will not have to know why we took it.

I'm excited to be included alongside so many other excellent writers, but I'm also happy to be back in a magazine edited by Sheldon Lee Compton and Jarrid Deaton. Sheldon published one of my very first stories in print, when he was editing another new journal called Cellar Door. That story--called "Fireworks"--was part of the first serious writing project I ever worked on, a novel-in-stories that I never finished (although two other stories from it appeared later, in Hobart and Storyglossia). Those early votes of confidence really meant a lot to me, and I've never forgotten. Thanks again, Sheldon.

One danger of writing a dispatch from the moment is you don’t know what is going to happen next. I continue to fear for the safety of my friends in Haiti—I am afraid to hope too much—and I plan to return to the country as soon as flights resume to see them with my own eyes and to offer whatever help I might. For now, I offer an excerpt—the story of Fabby’s kidnapping— from a book now less close to being finished. The village of Callebasse must be rebuilt. The ill and injured must be tended. The dead must be buried.

In a few weeks, the international media will leave the country, and Americans will be free to forget about Haiti once again. It is my hope that this story will give American readers a glimpse into the lives of people I have come to love in Haiti. We must not forget them.

--"A Kidnapping in Haiti" by Kyle Minor, published today in The Rumpus. Absolutely essential reading.

My story (and novella excerpt) "Kidd, Kier, Kimball" has been published in Alice Blue 10, thanks to the kind editorial skills of Sarah Gallien and the rest of the staff there. Alice Blue has been putting out great issues for a long time now (in internet time, at least), and I can still remember the first pieces of writing I read there (the excellent shorts "Geography Lesson" and "The Passport Thief" by Magdalen Powers), back in their Winter 06 issue. Since then, it's been one of the internet magazines whose issues I look forward to most, and so I'm very happy to be a part of this newest one.

Here's the beginning of "Kidd, Kier, Kimball":

Another new rain falls, dumped from the complicated sky, its acid-heavy droplets plummeting to pelt our shoulders as we run from awning to awning, from collapsing home porch to crumbling chapel steps. Along our way, we see every kind of bird upon the ground, all heavy with forgotten flying, and around them their mud-left eggs, as thin-walled as my wife's uterus, that tender thing trapped inside her unsafe body.

Within it, within us both, sound always these trapped prayers, necessary to be loosed.

I hope that after you read my my story you'll also check out the rest of the issue, which includes work by Ofelia Hunt, Andrew Borgstrom, Matthew Simmons, Kathy Fish, Sasha Fletcher, P.H. Madore, Jon Swan, Joseph Young, Kimberly Ruth, Michael Sikkema, Jack Boettcher, Mara Vahratian, Nicole Pollentier, J.R. Walsh, Theodore Worozbyt, Maged Zaher, J.P. Burnside, Jordan Stepleman, Olivia Cronk, Matt Morris, Gareth Lee, Julia Cohen, A.K. Scipioni, Thomas Cook, Tyler Dorholt, Jac Jemc, Marcia Arrieta, John Chavez, and Chris Theim. Thanks again to Sarah and everyone else at Alice Blue for letting me a part of the magazine.

Nik Korpon at the Outsider Writers Collective has written an interesting double review of my ML Press mini-chapbook "Fawn, Fiona, Fjola" (another story from Cataclysm Baby, my novella-in-shorts manuscript) and J.A. Tyler's chapbook WHEN WE MAKE OUR DINOSAUR, out now from Artistically Declined Press. The review isn't necessarily excerptible, but Korpon concludes by saying that "these two chapbooks were completely autonomous projects but, much like being a parent, the unexpected brought two independent elements together and created a wholly different emotional response." If you also want to read them together, you can order a copy of "Fawn, Fiona, Fjola" either individually for $3 or as part of an MLP subscription package, and then read Tyler's chapbook as a free download at Artistically Declined Press's website. Be sure to also check out OWC's new and improved website, which has recently received an excellent makeover. I'm very grateful to Korpon for his reading and subsequent thoughtful response to my story, and I hope you'll enjoy the rest of his work there and elsewhere.